Living With Insanity

Ah yes, this arc. I have a few comments on this one, so I think I’ll spread them out. But I’ll start with the most obvious.

For those of you unaware, Lar DeSouza is the artist on Least I Could Do and Looking For Group. He looks like this and usually draws himself like this. I sent reference pics to Paul so he would know what the guy looked like. And instead we got… well, you can see. I asked why. Everyone asked why as well. He said it was a stylistic choice. But in all honesty, I think he was trying to save me.

See, back in the day I used to write a number of strips about me meeting other creators I liked (Randy Milholland, Scott Kurtz, David Willis, Kate Beaton, etc.) and making an ass out of myself. The plan was to them email the creators and say “Hey, if you don’t like this I’ll take it down” and keep my fingers crossed that they liked it enough to link us. Paul always ignored those ones. I think it would be because if they went wrong, we’d get sued or something. But he would never skip a strip in a story arc. I thought I finally had him, especially since it was a tribute to one of my main influences at the time which I thought would be nice, but he managed to turn it around on me.

And neither Sohmer or DeSouza responded when I sent them an email. So I finally learnt my lesson and stopped trying to put real people in my comic.